


Only Mostly Dead (All Day)

by tisfan



Series: Tony Stark Bingo [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: LITERALLY, M/M, Magic, Nightmares, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Has A Heart, even when it's not beating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 19:06:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15419598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: When Tony wakes up dead, everyone is presumed to be having a bad day.





	Only Mostly Dead (All Day)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rebelmeg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/gifts), [Flight_Of_Icarus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flight_Of_Icarus/gifts).



> Title from Princess Bride 
> 
> "Presumed to be having a bad day" is a code phrase used by some EMTs to indicate "this guy is probably dead, but we're not doctors and we're not allowed to call it."
> 
>  
> 
> dedicated to the WinterIron Discord members who've all been talking about whether or not someone could be murdered with a crochet hook.

The world didn’t end with a bang, or even a whimper.

It ended with a sharp pain, like someone had stuck a crochet hook right behind his belly button and then yanked everything out. Tony barely made a sound when it happened. He took one breath that was a little shallower than the one before it.

And then it just… left his lungs.

He didn’t push it out, but it kept going and going until he was straining to breathe in again, and couldn’t.

It made a choking, soft rattle sound, as if he had a bad cold.

And then…. Everything stopped.

With a final thu-thud, Tony’s heart stopped beating.

Blackness.

He didn’t feel any different, not really. Nothing hurt, he just couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. Panic swamped at him. Was he dead? Was this what death was like? Being stuck in his (not quite yet) decaying corpse?

Tony struggled to move, and then--

\--sprang free from his body to hover over it like some dolled up tart from the original _Ghostbusters_ movie.

He made some fish-flailing efforts and managed to roll over in mid-air. “What the hell is this?” There was a… glowing rune on his body, just over his navel. That… that was not good. He tried to reach for his own body and as soon as his ghostly fingers touched skin, there was pressure. Resistance. He couldn’t touch himself.

Bucky shifted, then reached out his hand, groping for his husband. He patted the dead-Tony’s shoulder as if reassuring him. “You havva nightmare, doll?” Bucky mumbled, then--

“Tony?” Bucky sat straight up, eyes wide. “Tony, oh, oh, god.” He checked for a pulse, heartbeat, breathing. “Tony, Tony, no, no, no, _no_.”

“Bucky? Hey, honey, honey, I’m right here, this isn’t… this isn’t how it looks, I’m right--”

His hand slid right through Bucky in his attempt to comfort. Bucky didn’t react at all to Tony’s touch, to his voice. It was like Tony wasn’t even there. Tony managed to stop hovering like a dramatic Casper, but all he could do was watch, helpless and horrified, as Bucky screamed for help, as a med-team came in and tried, fruitlessly, to revive Tony.

Bucky was sobbing.

_Tony_ was sobbing. Except it wasn’t quite like crying. He couldn’t produce any tears. It was just needless shivering. Tony wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t beating. He was just… there. Watching as Bucky screamed and wept, watched as Steve had to hold Bucky back. Stuck. Witnessing, but useless.

Tony couldn’t do _anything_.

“Am I dead? Like, really dead?”

No one answered him. There were no pearly gates, no bright light, no door, no demon to drag him to hell. Just useless watching of his loved ones as they hurt for him.

He followed his body down to medical and watched as Cho tried to bring him back.

And failed.

No one could see him.

No one could hear him.

Tony tried walking through people a few times, and sometimes he’d get a brief shudder -- someone walked over his grave -- but that was all.

He couldn’t touch anything in the real world. He couldn’t move anything. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t do anything.

He was dead.

How the fuck had that happened, and what was he supposed to do now?

***

“Don’t panic, Stark,” Tony told himself.

He was in fact, finding it hard to panic; panic was a physically driven mental reaction (or a mentally driven physical reaction, Tony wasn’t quite sure.) In either case, the lack of a heart rate to increase, the complete absence of brain chemicals, no lungs to pant for air. Tony might have thought that this lack of physical symptoms might have alleviated all emotions -- that for the first time ever, he existed as a completely logic-driven creature, but he still ached for Bucky’s pain, he still missed his husband, his family.

He was still scared.

Maybe feelings weren’t quite as random and illogical as he thought, but the lack of chemical soup made it somehow easier to deal with those feelings.

“I’ll figure this out, honey,” he told Bucky, who’d fallen asleep, face still wet, over folded arms against Tony’s desk. “I’m still here. I promise.”

He couldn’t touch Bucky, but he let his fingers hover just over that thick hair. Let his hand drift until he was sliding through Bucky’s shoulder. It didn’t feel like anything to Tony, but people who were still alive sometimes had a brief reaction to it. Bucky’s sleeping settled out a little more, and Tony smiled down at him. It was something. “Be right back. Sleep. Hopefully this’ll just be a bad memory, real soon.”

Tony found himself in medical again without really being aware of it.

His body was on a gurney, naked, with a sheet tucked around his hips. There was a big Y drawn on his torso.

“Oh, fuck, no,” he said. “No, Helen, come on, Helen, no. I need that, don’t cut it up!” He reached for Helen’s wrist and the scalpel as if he could stop her from performing an autopsy. Of course everyone would want to know what happened to him, but… he was pretty sure if she started taking his organs out, that body wasn’t going to be habitable again.

Her hand shook as his fingers thrust right through her wrist.

She took a few deep breaths, tried again.

He ran through her.

She gasped, staggered back a step.

“Doctor Cho?”

“I’m fine, just…”

“We all loved Mr. Stark,” someone else said.

She nodded, like that was it. Tony ran through her again.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing to her, if it was hurting her in some indescribable way, but each time he made a pass, she paused.

He couldn’t keep this up forever, and just preventing the autopsy wasn’t going to help him get back into his body.

“Doctor Cho?”

Helen put the scalpel down in the tray. “I… I can’t do this today. I’m emotionally compromised. Put him away. I don’t want to miss something. We’ll try tomorrow.”

Tony would have sighed in relief, except that, again, no actual lungs.

God, this whole being dead thing sucked.

***

“Getcher own,” the woman said.

There weren’t terribly many homeless people around the Tower; Tony had people for that, who went around regularly and got people into shelters, or help or even just a warm meal and a bus ticket.

Tony blinked. “You can see me?”

He was pushing the outer boundaries of where he could and couldn’t go. It seemed like, somehow, he was still tied to his body (which was a little disconcerting) in that he couldn’t get more than about five hundred meters in any direction away from it.

Whenever he tried, he just ended up popped back to his body.

Weird. Disconcerting.

And really not useful for fixing this, since it wasn’t like he could haul his own body around.

“Yeah, like, you’re not a ghost or nothin’,” the woman said. She moved her bottle of cheap booze out of Tony’s grasp. Not that he was grasping for it. He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be able to take it from her anyway. “Although you mi’be a hallucination. S’pose that’s possible. That I’m jus’ a crazy, drunk, homeless bitch with a shopping cart an’ arguin’ with myself. Still ain’t sharin’ my hooch.”

Tony waved his hand in front of her face and she tracked the movement, which was encouraging. But then he stuck his hand into her, and it still passed right through her, which was not.

She didn’t scream, though. Or panic. Or protest. Or do any of the things that most normal people would do when confronted with the impermeable. All she did was swatted at him, like he was a particularly annoying fly.

“I wonder why you can see me,” Tony said, sitting down next to her. He also wondered why he didn’t fall through the planet, and why he couldn’t walk through walls. Getting out of the Tower had been an exercise in trying to dodge along with other people walking through the doors and pushing them open. Really, really frustrating to have all the disadvantages of being a ghost without any of the cool shit. “No one else can.”

“You look like my imaginary boyfriend?” she suggested, waving the bottle around. She took another long swill out of it. Cloudy, three dollar convenience store wine. Yuck. “Or maybe it’s the booze. I heard that sometimes that happens. You try walkin’ in a bar?”

“I can’t get that far away from my body,” Tony told her. He chewed on the side of his thumb; which did nothing. He couldn’t bite down with his teeth, but his own fingers wouldn’t pass through his ghostly body. Another weird, inconvenient thing. At least nothing itched, because he wasn’t sure how he could scratch.

“Sucks for you, dude,” she said, and dumped another half cup of what Tony assumed would be terrible smelling alcohol down her throat.

“What’s your name?”

“Abbie,” she responded. “And you are?”

“The ghost of Tony Stark?”

She cackled, rocking back on her heels. “You’re having a bad day, aren’t you, Mr. Ghost?”

She was a homeless, drunk lady and she could see him. The problem was, Tony couldn’t see a way where that would help him at all. Telling anyone she could see him wasn’t going to convince them, and in fact, would probably get her thrown in jail or something. She couldn’t get into the Tower and move his body for him; that would decidedly get her thrown in jail, even if he could navigate her all the way through the security checks. Most of them required some sort of biometrics.

Although--

“Lemme see your hands,” Tony said.

“Huh?” She held out one hand anyway. Tony looked at it; she wasn’t shaking too badly.

“How do you feel about a little B&E?”

***

Even with Abbie having nothing better to work with in her stash of supplies than some tape, a magnet, and a jelly knife, they managed to break into the coffee shop across the street from the Tower without setting off the alarms. Tony walked her through getting the computer turned on, evading the minimal and bad password set up, and logging in through his MIT email account.

Most of his more current email accounts had fingerprint locks or voice commands, but this was an old email and he used it specifically to harass Rhodey on occasion.

“Okay, first person we’re emailing--” Tony said, “is Dr. Cho. Her Tower email is [slicendice@stark.com](mailto:slicendice@stark.com)…”

Tony talked Abbie through four emails; Cho (please don’t cut him open yet, we might need that.) and Strange (I could really use some magical assistance) and Rhodey (I’m fine, but this is so weird.) and finally Bucky.

He hesitated. “If I tell him where we are, he may come here immediately,” Tony told Abbie. “I don’t blame you if you’d rather not deal with my husband when he’s got a complete mad-on. He can be really scary.”

Abbie cackled again. “This is like the high-tech version of Ghost, and you’re Patrick Swayze. Go ahead, what do I tell him?”

***

_Snowflake,_

_This isn’t a joke._

_I’d prefer you to come alone, since I don’t want you to scare the nice lady who’s typing this for me, as I’m not really connected to a physical form at the moment -- and I want you to know just how much it’s hurting my brain to say any of that -- but you can bring Nat as backup if you don’t trust us._

_Her name is Abbie, and for some reason, she’s the only one who can see me._

_I’m not in my body right now, honey, but I don’t think I’m dead. I’ve already asked Strange to come see if he can do something._

_But I’d really like to talk to you._

_Go out to the courtyard, and if you don’t freak her out too much, we’ll come out and talk._

_You know who I am_

_PS - You asked me if I had a nightmare, when you tried to wake me up. Called me doll. Please come out. I don’t know how to prove to you that any of this is real, but please…_

***

Bucky made up for all of Tony’s inability to have physical fidgets by committing most of them in about five minutes.

“So?”

“Well, yes, he’s decidedly dead,” Strange said, holding his hands out over the body. “He has experienced irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions. Medically, dead.”

Bucky made a sobbing sound, and Tony reached for his husband again. It still didn’t help, he couldn’t touch anything, he couldn’t make contact. “So she’s lying?”

“Oh, no,” Strange said. “He’s right there, I can see him plain as day. A spiritual manifestation. Almost solid, really. He doesn’t have any of the etherealness that’s characteristic of an astral projection. He just can’t interact with other humans, which he passes through, or with standard objects, like doors. Somewhat less than a poltergeist, but more than just a spirit. Yes, Stark, I see you, stop waving around like that. I can’t hear you, however, which is decidedly odd.”

“Your business is the odd and unusual,” Steve said. He was scowling down at Tony’s corpse as if it had personally offended him.

“Despite that, I’m not a miracle worker,” Strange said.

“Your guesses are better than most people’s facts, Strange,” Tony snapped. “Throw us a bone here, Merlin.”

Abbie shuffled her feet and looked up from the stack of cheeseburgers that Tony’d gotten Clint to obtain for her, pretty much first off. “He says make a guess, Merlin.”

“First off, Merlin was a magician,” Strange started--

“All hail Pedantia, goddess of literal humor,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “No, don’t repeat that. I don’t usually have a brain to mouth filter, but I’m getting used to the concept.”

Abbie laughed, dipped a handful of fries into her milkshake and ate them.

Yuck. But whatever. Calories in the homeless person, that was good, right?

“Wait, what?”

Abbie chewed faster. “He wasn’t paying attention, can you say that again?”

Strange huffed. “You’re familiar with the legend that if you die in your sleep, you die in real life, right? For years, science explained the phenomena as a lucid dream, complicated by sleep paralysis. Our bodies mostly go torpid in sleep, so we don’t flail around and hurt ourselves while dreaming, right? Except the _mara --_ from where we get our word nightmare -- are very real, if exceptionally rare.” Strange glanced at Tony, meeting his eyes, which was a fucking relief. Even after they’d established that Tony was there, everyone looked close to where they hoped he was, and Tony had taken to moving into their line of sight rather than getting Abbie to move them. “Someone like Stark, who suffers from nightmares enough that they cloud his aura even when he’s awake, he’s like a feeding ground to creatures like that.”

“They killed me in my dreams?” Given the situation, it shouldn’t have sounded as ridiculous as it still did. Maybe it was like alien abduction; even after proof positive that aliens existed, no one wanted to believe they’d just snatch people up. It was too scary. Better ridicule a few crazy people than believe that it happened every year.

“Probably be accident,” Strange continued. “They’re not really malicious. Or even that intelligent.”

“So, c’n you fix it?” That was Bucky, getting right to the point. Tony moved to his side again, his fingers drifting in and out of Bucky’s throat and shoulder. He shivered once, but having been told what it was, pushed into the sensation instead of pulling away, until he was half standing inside Tony’s incorporeal form.

“With a proper application of magic mixed with science, I believe so,” Strange said. “Dr. Cho, I need you to get the cor-- the body, please get the body back up and running. Artificial breathing, blood pumping, all of it. I can help you facilitate the procedure with judicious application of the time stone, to undo those changes death has already caused. Once the body is habitable, we’ll have to tempt the soul back into it.”

Cho nodded and pushed the gurney toward the operating room, calling her staff.

“Why do you have to tempt me?” Tony demanded. “I don’t _want_ to be dead.”

“It’s not a trivial process,” Strange said. “There’ve only been a few verified cases of resurrection before. And while we deified the last guy it happened to, he died about forty days later anyway.”

“You’re talking about Christ,” Steve said. “You’re going to make Tony into the second coming?”

Strange rolled his eyes, which meant that Tony didn’t have to. “No. I’m just saying it’s not a frequently successful event. Reincarnation is easier, but then Barnes would have to wait for Stark to grow up again. Also, that tends to cost a person their memory, so we might not even be able to _find_ him again, much less have Stark at our disposal. And, uncomfortable as that tends to make me, we need him.”

“I’m a mascot, great,” Tony muttered.

“More like a good luck charm,” Strange said, after Abbie repeated Tony’s words again. She’d finally finished off the last of her lunch and was scraping bits of cheese off the papers. “You’re a nexus of fortune; good luck coalesces where you are, in endeavours in which you participate. Luck is a powerful force, Stark, don’t underestimate it.”

Usually, Tony’s stomach would twist and his teeth would ache with the effort of not saying what he was thinking, or of dealing with his so-called luck, but there wasn’t a stomach to turn or a jaw to clench.

And Bucky turned to him. No one could say Tony’s husband wasn’t intuitive, because he’d figured out those cold patches, and he knew, without seeing or any other evidence, exactly where Tony was. “You are good luck,” he said, softly. “You’re my good luck, if nothing else. Come on back to me, baby.”

***

Being resurrected hurt.

Like, a lot.

Like, more than open heart surgery without anesthetics.

More than falling out of a hole in the sky.

Tony came back to himself screaming and remembered that dying hadn’t been so bad.

But then Bucky was there, biting his lip and trying not to cry with relief.

And Tony remembered that it was all worth it.


End file.
